


Best Revenge Is Your Paper

by laiqualaurelote



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: BAMF Karen Page, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Journalism, POV Karen Page, Reporter Karen Page
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-02-23 12:10:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13189806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laiqualaurelote/pseuds/laiqualaurelote
Summary: "Karen." It's Bob, the night copy-editor.  "Why haven't you been answering my calls?""Someone tried to kill me. Now I'm half-dead in a ditch.""Right," says Bob, unimpressed.  "You've got queries in your story.  Plug them, please.""Want me to shoot him?" inquires Frank."Jesus!" shouts Karen.  "Do not shoot the copy-editors for doing their jobs, Frank!"In which Karen Page gets a bunch of bylines, pisses off a lot of people, tries not to fall in love with her newsmaker and fails. Spans post-Daredevil Season 2 through The Defenders to post-Punisher Season 1. Not Daredevil S3 canon-compliant.





	1. Byline Count

 

 

 

 

> _You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation  
>  _ _Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper_
> 
> \- Beyoncé, 'Formation'

 

Things happen to Karen Page. It makes her the envy of other reporters. She's always first on the scene. More often than not - and this is truly annoying - she is the scene.

 

"I can walk," she snaps at Daredevil - Matt, she'll never get used to it - "it's only a sprain."

 

"Let me, please," says Matt. "Also, the building is on fire."

 

Karen has mixed feelings about the building being on fire. On the one hand, she is delighted because she has been trying for weeks to prove that the landlords are burning low-income tenants out to make way for new developments and disguising it as a series of accidents, and this has been pretty compelling evidence. On the other hand, she happens to be in the building, and the building is on fire. The smell of smoke will be in her hair for days.

 

"Don't you fireman-carry me," she says, "don't you dare."

 

"All right," says Matt, alarmed, hands out in a calming gesture, "all right - "

 

"And I don't want to see you again," she continues. "Not when I'm working, not when I'm not - not until you've sorted yourself and this vigilante shit out."

 

Matt is quiet, his jaw tight under the mask. Then he melts away into the flames and shadow, and she is left to limp alone to the entrance.

 

The reporters outside let out a weary cry as she hobbles out of the burning building. "Fucking Page again. Should have known. Couldn't you have stayed home one night, Page?"

 

Karen wearily flips them the bird.  

 

Brett Mahoney wants to take her statement. "But I need to file this story," complains Karen, "look at those assholes out there, they're beating me to it and I was here first - "

 

"Seriously?" sighs Brett. "I liked you a lot better when you were a paralegal."

 

But he lets her type up a quick draft for online on her phone and send it to Ellison, before he hauls her off down to the station.

 

Karen Page is the scene, and damn if her byline count doesn't show it.

 

*

 

She misses nice clothes. In her first few days masquerading as a reporter at the Bulletin, she wore her old paralegal outfits, silk blouses and pencil skirts, and a senior crimer called out: "Skirt that tight, how you gonna catch the newsmaker if he runs away?" and another chimed in: "Oh, they'll come running to her in skirts like that, and she knows it." Karen felt her face burn, and after that she spruced up her collection of cheap, practical clothing with lots of pockets.  

 

It's for the best, really - she goes through it all at an extraordinary rate, accumulating smells and stains she'd really rather not have to keep thinking about. She has to keep a special outfit in her desk drawer to visit the morgue in, because that's one smell you can never get out of your clothes. It's in a taped-up bag, next to her stilettos (for fancy jobs) and her wellingtons (for wading-in-the-sewer jobs).

 

After she pulls in enough covers, the other reporters hold her in a kind of distant, grudging respect. She knows they resent her, a rookie, for inheriting Ben's office, which is prime real estate in the bullpen. Half of them think she's sleeping with Ellison.

 

"Anything for me today, Page?" says Ellison, breezing in through the door. "Nice little story on corruption, 25 inches with pix, would look nice as sec lead on page four."

 

"You know I'm not a sec lead kind of girl," Karen shoots back. "What, did we lose another ad?"

 

"Pages are huge today," says Ellison. "Vast and empty as the Mariana trench. Go out and find me something, Page, one of those labour exploitation stories you do so well."

 

"Pretty sure there's a labour exploitation story right here," says Karen. "Am I even on payroll? Does human resources know I exist?"

 

"Print is dying," says Ellison, making a dramatic exit. "Have a heart."

 

"I'm a regular patron saint of lost causes, aren't I?" Karen shouts after him.

 

She blows her first paycheck on a digital recorder and fresh ammo for the .380. She considers spending the remainder on getting the bulletholes in her apartment fixed, but thinks better of it. They give the place character.

 

*

 

So she has no friends. The other reporters are polite but aloof, go out on group lunches without asking her along. Karen packs sandwiches and walks around the city, chews chilly egg mayo and people-watches. She sits on different benches along the waterfront, evaluates the view.

 

So she has no friends. That's okay. Foggy has been busy with casework and Marci, their plans for drinks falling through repeatedly because he's had to take a last-minute conference call, or she's had to chase some breaking news. Matt is...she'd like to not think about that for now. She works ridiculous hours and goes back home after midnight and heats up lasagna in the microwave while trying to wash mud or blood out of her trouser cuffs because she's really busting her clothing budget, damn it. She cleans the .380 and practises her quickdraw, stares at Wesley sitting on her couch in front of her, pulls the trigger, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. She sits in the spray of the hot-cold-hot-cold shower and cries once a month, but this is less frequent than it used to be and she counts it as an improvement.

 

She doesn't have friends, but she has contacts, an ever-growing of network of people coming out of the woodwork to the lure of her byline. She meets them in bars and the park and hole-in-the-wall pizza joints and dark alleys, the .380 nestled heavy in her purse.  

 

She has a job, and she loves it fiercely like she never thought she'd love a job. Certainly not the tedium of secretary work, fetching coffee and printouts and trying to avoid the handsier executives. She had thrilled to the research of legal work, but the drama of the courtroom was still a world behind glass, one that Matt and Foggy walked in and out of freely but she watched from the sidelines.  

 

Now it's like a constant fire burning under her, like every word a source drops is a ticking time-bomb that could go off any minute. It's not glamorous, not all covers and glossy photo bylines: it's hours and hours of legwork and shitty coffee and stupid stories about parking offences that Ellison lumps her with whenever she gets uppity with him. It's going to funerals and trying to get grieving people to tell you things they shouldn't about the ones they lost. It's going to funerals and getting spat on, the widow screaming, "Will this bring him back?" It's obsessing over clicks and views and wondering why people would rather read Buzzfeed than the stories that really matter, if anything matters, why anything at all.

 

Karen has never been so good at anything in her life. It terrifies her, a bit, that this is what it turned out to be.

 

*

 

So she has no friends, but she doesn't realise how lonely she has been until the night she finds the Punisher bleeding all over her living room carpet.

 

It has been a long night already. She is working on a piece on the unconscionably high fatality rate for immigrant construction workers, deaths which wouldn’t even score a mention in the paper on their own, but she hopes to find enough to draw the big picture: rushed work orders, sleep deprivation leading to slips, fear of deportation keeping mouths shut. If she finds enough perhaps she can make somebody else care. She has been running to and from the scenes of accidents, trying to sneak into construction sites in the dead of night, looking at bodies, so many bodies - crushed in pits, beheaded by sheet metal, fallen from heights with depressing regularity. Her dreams are full of mangled corpses at the bottom of lift shafts.  

 

She comes home from the morgue, where she has waited three hours in vain to see if any family would come for the body of a Colombian worker who took a 50-foot tumble from scaffolding - no safety harness provided - comes home dog-tired to her bullet-riddled empty apartment, except it isn't empty. Frank is lying in the middle of the living room, the carpet already dark with blood.  Karen has seen so many bodies in the past week that her mind simply goes “oh, not again”, before she registers who it is. This takes a few beats, because his face has bruised up like a topographical map.

 

Karen has nothing to say to this really, so she sinks to the floor next to him and lets her head thunk back on the couch.

 

After some minutes of companionable silence, she ventures: "How'd you get in?"

 

"Fire escape," says Frank. "Your lock is shit."

 

"Well excuse me if I can't afford to Punisher-proof my place on my measly reporter's salary," deadpans Karen. "Why didn't you take the couch?"

 

"Already bleeding on your carpet, ma'am. Couch is harder to clean."

 

"Fair enough," says Karen. "Should I, uh, do you need to do stitching? I don't think I've got the, you know, the stitching things."

 

"Nah," says Frank. She thinks he's smiling, but it could just be the way the bruises are distorting the corners of his mouth. "Just need to lie here for a bit.  I'll be out of your hair in no time."

 

Karen really ought to be a better host, but she can't find it in herself right now to do anything except, perhaps, lie right down on the carpet next to him and pass out too. Well, maybe take a shower first.  

 

"Is anybody coming after you?" she asks. She doesn't think she can handle being kidnapped or set upon, at least not in the next 48 hours.

 

"'S all right," says Frank. "All dead now.  I'd never endanger you like that, ma'am."

 

"That's very nice of you," says Karen, forcing herself onto her feet. "I'm going to take a shower now, if you don't mind. You can just lie here and, um, bleed quietly."

 

When she gets out of the shower, Frank has gone to sleep, breathing deep and even. Karen towels her hair and stares down at him, this man she hasn't seen since, well, she told him she didn't want to see him again - a recurring trend, this - and then was inordinately glad to see again nevertheless, gunning down ninjas from a rooftop in his tactless tac vest. And nothing since then, except, oh, the occasional murdered gang member here and there, so random you wouldn't notice unless you knew to keep track, which of course she does. And now this, showing up without a word of warning, and she'd be annoyed except she's been so goddamn lonely in this here apartment that it is actually rather good to have a houseguest for a change who isn't Wesley's ghost, even if said houseguest is out of it and slowly ruining her carpet beyond repair.

 

In the morning, Frank is up before her because he clearly wasn't joking about his miracle powers of regeneration, making coffee using the cafetiere her mum sent her for Christmas and which she never uses because it's too complicated to wash. He has scrubbed up fine, thinks Karen sleepily, accepting a mug of coffee from him.  He has put it in the mug labelled "TEA", just to be contrary.

 

"What are you up to these days?" she says. "Besides being dead, that is."

 

"I'm not sure you'd want to know." Frank is drinking his coffee black, because of course. Karen makes a half-hearted attempt to find milk in the fridge, but it turns out to be about a month old. She settles for just sugar. "Might offend your, uh, sensibilities. You're like Red, in that respect."

 

Karen doesn't want to talk about Daredevil, so she changes the subject. "This is pretty good coffee.”

 

“I do make a mean cup of coffee, if I say so myself,” says Frank. “One of my lesser known skills. Tends to be overshadowed by my ability to kill a man with my bare hands.”

 

Karen rolls her eyes.

 

Frank has moved to do the washing up. He has rolled up his sleeves to above the elbow, and Karen finds herself staring at the broad expanse of his forearms, marred here and there by scarring. He takes hold of the cafetiere to dismantle it, and the movement makes the muscles in his wrists flex. Karen chokes on her coffee.

 

She is a mess, is Karen Page.

 

“I have to go to the morgue,” she says out loud. “Will you be here when I get back?"

 

"Don't look like,” says Frank. "Think I’m pretty much fixed up. Like I said, out of your hair in no time."

 

"Okay," says Karen, trying to keep her voice light. "Lock up after yourself, will you? To keep the normal non-Punisher criminals out."

 

"Yes ma'am." And then, as she's heading out, "Thank you, Karen."

 

Nobody comes to the morgue today either. Karen's just about given up when a tip off comes in that another body has been found at JFK, the last of the Irish mobsters, choked to death in an airport bathroom stall. Karen lingers at the edge of the police tape, staring at the bloodstains on the wall, a sour feeling in her chest.

 

When she gets back to her place, Frank has gone and so has the carpet. It's months before she sees him again, although a new roll of carpet mysteriously appears in the stairwell two weeks later. It's a hideous, seasonal red, with a snowman pattern, because Frank is clearly still an asshole. Karen stashes it in a corner and never uses it, like the cafetiere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't written fic for four years and I cannot believe it's The Punisher, of all the fandoms, which brought me back. I don't even go here, you guys.
> 
> I know very little about guns or New York. I just wanted fic in which Karen is a kickass reporter. The title is from Beyoncé. Forgive me, queen.


	2. Nutgraf

Today is a court day, Karen decides. When she's short on things to chase, she goes down to the courthouse and does the rounds. There's a sweet spot, the ten minutes or so between the lawyers arriving to set up and the "All rise", when you can wander in and out of the courtrooms and quiz the prosecutors about what they're up to. She's been round enough that some are congenial enough for banter, and greet her with a "It's just drugs today, Page, nothing for you to get excited about," or "Hot tip for you, serial molester coming up around 11. Pretended to be a doctor, asked little girls if he could check their heartbeat." If she doesn't finish the round before court goes into session, she drifts in and out of the courtrooms, listening. It's sort of like watching cable TV and flipping through channels, trying to work out what's going on when you land in the middle of the episode.

 

“Court 37 at 10.30, Page,” a prosecutor tells her. “You’ll like this one." He's one of those who tried to hit on her when she first started coming round, and Karen even considered it for a bit - pleasant-looking, stable job upholding the law - but it was all rather normal and then she never got round to doing anything about it.  She isn’t sure she can do normal any more.   

 

“Court 37 is pre-trial conferences,” she points out with some bemusement. "There won't be anything going on there."

 

“Just check it out,” he says. “You can thank me later.”

 

At 10.45am, the doors of Court 37 swing open. She hears the tap of his cane before he emerges. Karen is frozen, unsure if she should open her mouth, and then he brushes past her into the corridor and she says: “Matt.”

 

Matt spins around. “Karen,” he says, breath catching.

 

They stand there staring at each other - well, Karen stares. Matt lowers his unseeing gaze and swallows.

 

“I was told there was a hot lead in Court 37,” says Karen, after a beat. “I’m guessing that’s you.”

 

"Well, thank you." Matt cracks a small smile at the floor. "I'm flattered."

 

“So. You wanna grab coffee, tell me what you’re working on?”

 

“I thought you said you didn’t want to see me again.”

 

Karen sighs. “Well, yes. But if there’s a scoop involved, counsellor, I’m willing to overlook the injunction.”

 

Matt gestures with the cane. “Lead on, Ms Page.”

 

At the diner around the corner, he tells her about the new case he’s taken pro bono, a boy left in a wheelchair by the chemicals leaking from a subway. The details of the case - corporate greed, wronged innocents, things that do it for both of them - are galvanising enough to smooth over the awkwardness between them. “Will he talk to the press?” says Karen.  “I know he’s young, but can you help me square it with him and his parents? I’ll be sensitive. You know how I can be.”

 

“I’ll tell them it’s coming from the best in the business,” says Matt.

 

Karen tucks a strand of hair behind her ear to hide her grin. “Exclusive, okay?  No one else gets in on this before I do.”

 

“Wow,” says Matt. “Pushy Karen. I dig it.”

 

He takes a sip of coffee, then says abruptly: “I’ve stopped, you know.”

 

Karen has the presence of mind to turn her recorder off.

 

Matt nods his head slightly to acknowledge the gesture. “I’ve stopped the vigilante work. I thought you should know.”

 

“Good. I’m glad. For your sake.”

 

“I don’t mean to say we can just pick up where we left off,” Matt goes on. “I don’t mean that at all. I just wanted you to know in case - well - in case that changed anything.”

 

Karen is quite still. She still remembers being in love with Matt quite clearly. She remembers why she was: because he was kind, and funny, and looking out for her at a time when nobody else seemed to be. None of this has changed, really. She has changed; she doesn't remember when or how, but somewhere along the line she has stopped being in love. Now she observes the memory of it with a kind of detached curiosity, like a pressed flower under glass.

 

“I wish you’d told me to begin with,” she says.

 

Matt sighs. “Sometimes I wish I had too. But I wanted to protect you from it, Karen. You were everything that my other life wasn’t - you were good, and sweet, and I couldn’t let it touch you.”

 

Karen spent yesterday knocking on the doors of the families of murdered children. "I am so sorry to disturb you," she would say, "but we are doing a piece on the anniversary of the kidnappings. I wanted to ask how you're doing." This is the worst part of it, looking into the eyes of people who have lost more than she will ever comprehend, and pushing them, prodding them when they want to be left alone. She did it to Frank once, with what you might call considerable success, and now she has made a career of it. Karen is not sweet. Karen is not good.

 

“Coffee’s on me,” she says, a note of finality in her tone. “Will you let me know how it goes with the James family?”

 

Matt takes it well. “Sure,” he says. And then, as they get up to go, “We’ll speak again, Karen.”

 

Her story on the Aaron James case goes viral quickly, swamps Matt and the family with reporters. Karen doesn’t let it faze her, knows Matt will keep the exclusives for her, knows this with a confidence she didn’t have for his love. When he wins the trial, she stands apart from the crush and waits for him to catch the sound of her breath.

 

The next week, Midland Circle goes down.  

 

*

 

Frank is back in her apartment. Karen is not sure how this happened. From the time she heard that rough voice say her name in the street, things have been something of a blur.

 

Now she is handing him a beer. He looks nominally healthy, despite the awful hipster beard, but there is something hunted in his expression that reminds her of old times, of hospital rooms and diners riddled with bullet holes.

 

After Matt’s death she has lived under a sort of hermetic seal, waking up and not crying, putting on make-up and not crying, going about her day and not crying. All smooth, all functional.  Every other day she has to call Foggy and listen to him break down over the phone about how he brought Matt the suit, propelled him into martyrdom. It’s taking far too much of her to keep Foggy going now. Everything else she has had to keep locked down, so that she can carry on.  

 

And now. Karen locks eyes with Frank across her living room and feels something in her being prised apart.

 

“I could really use your help,” he says.  

 

Right. This, she can do. Transactional relationships she can handle. Karen’s job is all about using people, after all. She’s a glorified stalker paid to convince people to tell her things they shouldn’t for free. Frank would like to use her. This she comprehends.

 

“Okay,” she says.

 

“Okay?”

 

“Okay.”

 

When he moves to leave, she doesn’t know why she flings her arms around him. She feels the surprise in him, but he doesn’t pull away; after a while, his hand comes to rest, heavy, on her back. She thinks, _I cannot lose another._ Another what? Another vigilante? Or? She shoves the thought into the recesses of her mind. His beard is scratchy against her neck. She decides she hates it.

 

After he’s gone, she puts the flowers in water, teases out their white petals. She has begun crying again, after everything. Wesley smirks at her, sightless and bloody, from the couch. “You can fuck right off,” she tells him, and throws a beer bottle through his bullet-strewn chest.

 

*

 

After Frank goes off to presumably draw and quarter Micro on her leads - _her_ leads! - she tries to keep herself busy. Karen Page does not sit around waiting for vigilantes to happen to her.  There are crime spikes in Jamaica, employer kickbacks in Bushwick and even the odd serial killer here and there. Karen goes along to see the police take the serial killer back to his house for a crime scene walkthrough. The last victim, a 16-year-old cheerleader from the Bronx, has yet to be found. “Where is she?” demands the investigating officer. The killer smiles, oily, and gestures with cuffed hands towards a cooler box sitting by the door, so small that Karen could circle it with her arms. She claps a hand over her mouth but does not throw up. The reporter next to her, a satchel-swinging hipster fresh out of J-school, does.

 

She’s barely done with the FBI when the call comes in from Homeland. There, she’s hustled up to see a Dinah Madani. Karen takes one look at the bruises on her beautiful skin, at the way she winces when she sits down, and her gut instinct tells her unerringly that Frank has been messing around. She goes home and sticks the flowers in the window.

 

Frank finds her at the riverside again. Karen has always tried to work out, each time they meet, the exact moment he begins following her; to this day she has not succeeded.  

 

The good news, it emerges, is that Frank has exercised some self-restraint for a change and not killed Micro. The bad news is that he has not only got Madani run over but also been made by her, plus he has found more people that he absolutely needs to murder. Karen could punch him.

 

“You tell me,” she pleads. Worth a shot. “I write a story about it. We let the truth hang them.”

 

Which only sets Frank off. “I can't go after these men and keep you safe,” he growls. “My family's gone 'cause of what I know. I cannot let that happen to you, you got that? I cannot let that happen.” And then he drops, as she knows he will do, from explosive rage to hangdog desperation like a stone. “Please.”

 

He’s immensely exasperating, but Frank is pretty much the only person in her life whom she will let get away with this, because she’s still walking the earth thanks to his overprotective stalking. This is a debt all the ruined carpets in the world cannot wipe out. While she’s trying to think of a snippy comeback, he leans in abruptly and she feels his breath ghost against her ear. Then he’s off, sloping angrily into the wind.  

 

Karen stares after him in shock. She is not sure if this was an attempt to kiss her, or merely breathe on her face, or whatever. Neither of them seems well-suited to social cues right now.

 

She thinks back on his words later, when he’s watching her being dragged into a lift with a bomb pressed into her back. Far too many things in this hotel corridor that could kill him and he will not take his eyes off her. “I will come for you,” she hears him say as the doors close, and despite everything it fills her with a kind of light. He always has.

 

*

 

The second the lift doors close, they fall apart, gasping. Karen's ears are still ringing from the blast; she has to clutch at the wall for balance. There is something sticking out of Frank's arm. Karen wonders hazily if it is shrapnel. Metal? Glass?

 

It is in that moment that she realises she loves him. It is not like anything that has come before, not the giddy sweetness she felt when Matt touched her face in the rain. This is huge, and looming, and fills her with dread so that she can't even bear to look at it straight. Here she is with a gun in her hand and a dead boy's smithereens in her hair, and the knowledge of love come upon her so suddenly that it stops her breath. "I will come for you," he had said. Even in the midst of her terror it had flared within her, this thing, and now it has expanded so large in the space within them she can hardly bear to open her eyes.  

 

Frank has dislodged the ceiling panel, and now he stops and looks at her. He is a murderer, she tells herself, who has killed - in her name, even - and will do so again and again. It is likely he would kill the world for her, and how can she face that? And why does the thought move her so? She may never see him again. She comes up to him so close they are sharing breath, foreheads pressed together, but there is an incredible sadness in his eyes, a sadness like a gaping chasm, and she drops away. "Go on," she hears herself say. "Go."

 

“Take care,” he whispers, and then he hauls himself through the lift ceiling in what must be unimaginable pain and leaves her, and she too is in pain, all over, her head and ribcage and legs but oddly too the cavity in her chest, tight like it’s being crushed in a fist, she doesn’t understand and she sinks onto the floor and cries, unrelenting and ugly, until the NYPD break down the doors.  

 

*

 

Ellison is over the moon at her first person exclusive, or at least as over the moon as is respectable to be when one’s employee has been held hostage by a terrorist. “We’re going to put this behind the fucking paywall,” he crows. “Motherfuckers can _subscribe_.”

 

Karen is so exhausted that her copy reads like a drunk person stumbling down the sidewalk, vomiting grammar mistakes right and left. Mitsuko, the 60-year-old copy-editor of whom the newsroom lives in terror, is going through it with a scowl.  Karen would like to do some more crying, but there’s off stone to meet and perhaps if she is sarcastic enough to everyone she can make it through the night without dissolving into a heap of tears. She cries too much for a journalist, or a New Yorker.

 

“You know,” Ellison is saying, “whenever there’s a crisis and it turns out you’re already in it, I just think, _thank goodness it’s Karen_. I mean, not that I _want_ you to be constantly shot at and kidnapped, but if it has to happen to any of my people, at least it’s you. Half the guys in here would probably shit a brick and forget to get full names and designations.”

 

“That is such a dreadful compliment, Mitchell,” says Mitsuko. “Karen, dear, your Oxford commas are running wild. A gun to the head is terribly distracting, of course, but we must always remember our AP style.”

 

“Whatever happened to being overprotective, Ellison?” she demands.

 

“Seriously?” Ellison points at her. “The Punisher took a bullet for you. What am I going to do that he can’t, throw coffee at them?”

 

“The coffee in this newsroom is pretty toxic,” Karen points out. “You could use it as drain cleaner.”

 

“Let’s face it,” Ellison goes on, “you’re even more of a shit magnet than Ben was, may he rest in peace. At least he had to go looking for his shit. You just walk around and it lands on you. So we might as well make the best out of it and turn your shit magnetism into subscription figures. I’m being pragmatic. Anyway, we’ve all established that you can handle yourself.”

 

“I should have hazard pay,” laments Karen.  

 

“Hold that thought,” says Ellison, sliding towards the door. “Gotta go. Somebody needs to do the sked around here.”

 

“Karen,” says Mitsuko, “this Punisher fellow seems to have an unhealthy fixation on you. And you seem to encourage it, which I don’t find salutary.”

 

The story is a loose retelling of what Karen gave in her police statement. She thought she had left out all the questionable bits, but clearly Mitsuko is a credit to her profession when it comes to reading between the lines and Karen Page can’t fudge to save her life. "I - " she stammers " - it’s not - "

 

"I'm not judging your life choices, my dear," says Mitsuko crisply, "just your copy. Let's try to keep it platonic, for the sake of house style. I’m sending it back to you for checks. See queries in bold."

 

*

 

In the days to come, Karen keeps her ear to the ground, listens for bodies falling. There's a shootout at the carousel where his family died, and she knows it must be him, but he has vanished again into the ether. She finagles an interview with the girl whom Russo cut up and used as bait. "He came for us," says Hayley, her voice still shaking when asked to recall the horror of that night, "he didn't have to but he came for us, and he waited with us and the lady for the cops to come even though he could have run whenever. He waited."

 

"He does that," says Karen, absent-mindedly. The girl stares at her. Karen collects herself and asks her follow-up questions.

 

Lieberman is home. Karen watches him from across the street, his family hanging on to him as if they fear he might vanish again any second. If Lieberman is safe then Frank must be too, but he has dissolved into the system, it seems.  She will hear from him when the time is right, she tells herself, and waits. The roses in her window wilt and rot, and she throws them in the trash. She waits, and waits, and waits.


	3. Bury The Lede

"When I said try to keep yourself busy," says Ellison, "I did not mean go get yourself arrested."

 

They are waiting at the bail office to collect Karen's things. Karen's hair feels greasy. In fact she feels greasy all over, having spent the night curled up half asleep on a bench in holding, counting the cracks in the ceiling until the precinct opened and Ellison was able to post bail.

 

"I mean,” Ellison goes on, “if you must trespass, could you at least do it on a weekday?”

 

“Wasn’t it you who told me that time and scoops wait for no man?” retorts Karen.

 

“I’m fairly sure I’ve never said anything so trite.”

 

"It'll probably just end up as a stern warning," says Karen in what she hopes are soothing tones, "everyone gets those.  Ralph from the Inquirer has five, and he's always bragging."

 

Ellison throws up his hands in exasperation. "It's not a loyalty card, if you accumulate five warnings you don't get a free donut."

 

Karen's purse is handed over in a Ziploc bag by a disinterested officer. "Last time I spent the night in jail, somebody tried to strangle me in my sleep," she remarks, signing it out. “So really this has been an improvement.”

 

"It's very worrying, the calm with which you say these things," says Ellison. "Would you like to take some leave? I think you should take some leave.”

 

Karen gives him the side-eye. “That’s uncharacteristically generous of you, boss.”

 

“You've accumulated way too much leave,” says Ellison, “if you don't clear it by this financial year then we will actually have to pay you for overtime and HR will come after me. Oh good, here's your lawyer. Thank you, Mr Nelson. Karen needs more friends like you."

 

"Pretty sure Foggy's my only friend left in New York," says Karen, unironically because she really needs friends who aren't vigilantes with a penchant for dying or disappearing on her. Vigilantes make for terrible friends, but then again, so do reporters.

 

"Thanks for ruining my Sunday morning," says Ellison by way of parting. "Try not to need bailing out again before the work week. And think about that leave."

 

Foggy gives her a warm, if perplexed hug. “This isn't exactly the mimosa brunch I had in mind for our Sunday date."

 

"I'm sorry," says Karen, "I did some trespassing last night. I swear it looked like public property to me. Do you mind if we go back to mine first? Only I smell like mildew and drunk people’s saliva, and they’re not going to let us into anywhere nice.”

 

After she’s finally presentable enough for civil society, they manage to get into a nice diner off Canal Street, where Foggy swears by the sour cherry pie. It’s tart and welcome on her tongue; she doesn’t know when she lost her taste for sweet stuff, but now anything remotely saccharine curls her stomach. She forks up another chunk of flaky lattice crust and bloody cherry, and sighs.  

 

It has been such a long time since they have seen each other in a context that didn’t involve either of them breaking down over Matt. They talk about her stories - “How many covers _do_ you churn out, Karen Page?  You should change your middle name to Front” - and his casework, even how things are with Marci. “She’s begun watching a lot of wedding-related reality TV,” says Foggy, with some gloom. “Like Married At First Sight.  When did we sink to the level of Lifetime entertainment to send subliminal messages, I ask you?”

 

“So would you?” says Karen. “If she asked. Because obviously she’s going to be the one doing the asking.”

 

“I am trying not to think about it,” says Foggy, head in hands. “When she drops hints, I shout random words, like ‘Bagels!’ and run away while she’s distracted. She’s very persistent, though. She’s a hell of a litigator.”

 

“I expect I am invited,” says Karen. “I’ll even plan your stag night if you like.”

 

Since this would have fallen to Matt if he were alive, but he isn’t, neither of them adds.

 

“So what about you?” Foggy prods gently, after some silence filled with chewing. “Are you seeing anyone?”

 

I have tried for months not to notice that I am in love with a mass murderer, who is either dead or avoiding me, Karen does not say. “Nope. Practically married to the paper, at this point.”

 

Foggy looks at her searchingly. “Sure.” And then: “We’ll find you someone nice. Marci has a cousin in real estate who’s just got back on Tinder. Haven’t exactly done a thorough background check, but pretty sure he’s not a vigilante.”

 

“Bagels!” shouts Karen. And then, as Foggy fails to be distracted, “See, it doesn’t work.”

 

“You have to shout and run away.”

 

“Well,” says Karen, “running away is something I’ve always been singularly bad at.”

 

*

 

“Just because your ex and I beat some people up together does not mean we are _friends_ ,” says Jessica Jones.

 

Karen purses her lips and looks down at her. Jessica has her boots propped on her filthy desk, which is littered with more empty coffee cups than the dumpster out back of a Starbucks, and is picking what may or may not be dried blood out from under her fingernails with an air of nonchalance. There are so many empty bottles on the floor that it looks like a glass recycling plant.

 

Karen lets the dig slide because she knows Jessica feels just as awful as anyone about what happened with Matt. She knows this from Trish, who added her to a WhatsApp group for “people who were stuck in the precinct together overnight”, which she remains in because she would feel bad about being the first one to exit.

 

“I’m not looking to be friends,” she says. “I just want to learn how to take decent photos.”

 

The photographers are the most overworked people at the Bulletin, which is saying a lot. There are just a handful of them fielding assignments for the entire paper, which is why they look at Karen with sad eyes when she files photo chits like "Overnight warehouse stakeout. Perp may or may not show". When she goes it alone, the subs complain about having to blow up her shitty phone photos. Which brings her to this crappy office ahead of her night shift, packing a DSLR she nicked from photodesk, because while Jessica Jones is best known in the business for being able to punch a man through a wall, she also happens to be a wizard with a telephoto lens.

 

“I’m no Annie Leibovitz,” says Jessica, “just your average professional stalker.”

 

“Good enough for me.”

 

“And I’m not a charitable institution,” she goes on irritably.

 

Karen fishes in her bag - Mary Poppins-sized, as befits a journalist - pulls out a bottle of Rittenhouse and sticks it on the table. "I'll pay you in whiskey.”

 

"Aw, rye," says Jessica. “Let’s go.”

 

Somehow they end up day-drinking on a rooftop, as Jessica instructs Karen on stuff like aperture and shutter speed and the rule of thirds while they take stalker shots of the clueless folks on the street. "I really should not be doing this," laments Karen. "I’m on night shift, I've got the commissioner's speech to cover this evening."

 

"God, you'll need more alcohol to get through that," retorts Jessica, topping her up. "You know what’s a really good way to practise your focussing? While drinking. Here, give it a go.”

 

Karen downs the whiskey, gasps from the burn of it, places her finger on manual focus and rolls it slowly, click by click. Breathes in and times the shutter with her exhale, like Jessica taught her.  

 

Jessica squints at the viewfinder. “Not terrible, Blondie. Not gonna make the cover of Vanity Fair, but good enough for crime scene evidence. Avoid lines like these, it distracts the eye when they bisect the frame like that. Again.”

 

And adds, as Karen searches the street for something new to focus on: “So, you still seeing the Punisher?”

 

Karen nearly drops the camera. It’s lucky she has the strap around her neck, because photodesk would kill her. “I haven’t seen him since his last public appearance,” she says, carefully.  

 

“Huh,” Jessica slants a look at her. “Funny. I thought that’s what you really came to see me about.”

 

“I’m just a girl trying to upgrade her job skills,” says Karen. The whiskey has left her throat oddly raw. “You’ve seen him?”

 

“Down at the docks,” says Jessica. “Someone was shifting arms, and it seems like your boy was shopping. I was there on unrelated business, didn’t have enough sense to get the hell out of there once the shit hit the fan. I mean, I don’t beat dudes up recreationally, like some people we know. I got a glimpse of him, though. I always remember a nice jawline. Hey, you okay?”

 

Karen is not okay. Karen is livid, and she would like to punch something and storm off, except that is probably not wise because she is more than a little drunk and five storeys up, and if she plummets that height she will probably not survive it, unlike Jessica. It’s not like he promised her anything, another part of her tries to reason; he saved her life, got the hell out of dodge, he doesn’t owe her the time of day. And still. Would it have killed him to send word?

 

“Wow.” Jessica is staring at her. Jessica behaves half the time like she is drunk off her ass and the other half like she’s bitterly hungover, but she is a professional private eye and therefore far more discerning than Karen would like her to be right now. “You really did _not_ know. Jesus, I was joking! I thought you were after him for a story, but my god you have it bad.”

 

“Did he say anything?” says Karen in a low voice.

 

“Yeah, we swapped digits and we’re having brunch at the Cheesecake Factory next weekend.” Jessica rolls her eyes. “Duh, no. It wasn’t that kind of party. You really know how to pick 'em, don’t you?”

 

“You’re not one to talk,” says Karen, who actually knows squat about Jessica’s love life but thinks this is a safe assumption.

 

“Touche.” Jessica swaps her empty glass for a full one. Karen knocks as much of it back as she can without burning a hole in her throat. “If it makes you feel any better, he’s probably trying to keep you away from him to keep you safe. You know, when you’re convinced you bring death and destruction to whoever you love, so you cut them loose and delete their number and try not to be all hung up about it when they move on and find a nice, decent person to live out their pure cinnamon roll lives with.”

 

“Um,” says Karen. “Are you speaking from personal experience?”

 

“Oh shut up,” says Jessica.

 

“I am so done,” says Karen, “with vigilantes giving me advice on my love life.”

 

“No shit,” says Jessica. “Who am I to give you any kind of advice, my love life is getting along like a house on fire, by which I mean everyone is screaming and trying to escape, or should I say a bar on fire, which then explodes - why I am telling you all this? Did you work some reporter magic on me?”

 

“I...thought we were talking about my problems here,” says Karen, nonplussed.

 

Jessica flaps a hand at her. “Nah, I don’t talk about other people’s problems, unless they’re paying me to make them go away.”  

 

“Well,” says Karen, “I hope you sort things out with Pure Cinnamon Roll.”

 

“If you tell anybody we had this conversation, I’ll set your newspaper on fire,” says Jessica. “I mean all your newspaper. I bet you have loads. Meanwhile, if I see your boy around the neighbourhood, I’ll tell him to get his jarhead out of his ass.” She squints at Karen in the late afternoon light. “You’re all right, Blondie, for a journo. As Murdock’s exes go, you’re definitely my favourite.”

 

Karen does not remember later how she gets off the roof, or to the commissioner's public address. She keeps dozing off during the speech, but fortunately nobody notices because the event is ambushed by streakers, after which the story kind of writes itself. She does get to practise some of what Jessica taught her this afternoon, although the subs deem most of her photos unprintable.

 

("We are a family paper, Page!  Yo Sanjeev, get over here, we need you to pixellate some dick real quick."

 

 "For fuck's sakes, guys, I was on my way out. Who shot this? Was it Page? Fucking Page.")

 

The next morning, she wakes up to a ghastly hangover and a text from Jessica, which turns out to be a screenshot of her story on the streakers, which has gone viral. Jessica has circled their blurry groin areas and added the caption "FOCUS STILL NEEDS WORK".

 

"NOT MUCH THERE TO FOCUS ON," Karen texts back, then lies in bed feeling sorry for herself.

 

*

 

Things have been slow. Too slow. So in a way Karen is not surprised when the envelope shows up.

 

It arrives on the trolley with the rest of the newsroom mail. It's a little puffy, she observes in passing, but thinks nothing of it until she slices it open during a coffee break and it engulfs her in a cloud of white powder.

 

There follow a few seconds of shocked silence. Then Mauricio the layout sub wanders into her office waving a proof and saying: "Hey, Page, we gotta cut some inches off your story, where's it gonna hurt least to stick the knife - " and stops dead in his tracks at the sight of her dusted in white.

 

"Close the door!" screams Karen. "Close the door!"

 

Mauricio cuts and runs, slamming the door behind him. There is some panicked hubbub outside. Karen tries to work out if there is powder in her mouth.

 

Her desk phone rings. "Karen," says Ellison without preamble, "we've called NYPD, they'll be here any second, don't touch anything you haven't already touched. Can you describe what's happening?"

 

"Um," says Karen, "there's a lot of powder, white, no smell, came in a normal manila envelope, no name or return address. I feel a bit dizzy, but that might be down to the whole skipping lunch thing."

 

"Karen," says Ellison, "if you get out of there alive, we need to talk about your work-life balance."

 

"Did everyone get out okay?"

 

"They've evacuated the newsroom. You warned us in time."

 

Karen laughs wryly. "Bet they're glad now that you let me have my own office."

 

By the time the NYPD show up, she has photographed the envelope and its contents and sent Foggy a voice message ("hey, covered in potential biohazard, if actually fatal please cremate me with my byline file and don't let my mom take the ashes back to Vermont." Beat. "I'm sorry nobody is going to plan your stag party now, Foggy. But wherever I'm going, I promise I'll find Matt and kick his ass for you.")

 

Then there are tests, and questions, and a ridiculous amount of swabbing, and then she is put into a hazmat suit and taken away to a secure wing of the hospital and then more tests, and somehow in the middle of this it all gets leaked to other media and there are blurry photos of her being bundled into the back of an ambulance trending on Twitter alongside her least favourite byline photo, and Karen is mortified, and of course then all the tests come back and conclude it was a false alarm.

 

"Well that's a relief, isn't it?" says Foggy, who had rushed to the hospital the moment he got out of his deposition and heard Karen's crazed voice message. Karen is wildly happy to see him, even if she is also dying of embarrassment. "That's it's not real? Unless it's something new they don't even have tests for yet, in which case I want you to monitor your vitals and come back the moment you feel anything's off."

 

"It makes no sense," Karen says, pacing around the stairwell. They're hiding there until Karen's various nemeses from other media outlets get bored and let her slip out the back of the hospital. It might be a while, because it's a slow news day, and in any case they all like to watch her suffer. "Why would someone send me fake anthrax? If they're trying to threaten me, they've just brought my days of not taking them seriously to a middle."

 

"Have you offended anyone?"

 

"Besides the hundreds of people I upset on a daily basis by continuing to write for the Bulletin?" Karen scrubs her hands through her hair, which they cut chunks out of to test. "I was even saying to Ellison that it was a slow week. Apparently that's a taboo in the newsroom, you know? Like a curse. Say that it's a slow week and then kaboom, explosion in Midtown or something."

 

"On the bright side, nobody tried to explode you this time," Foggy tries. "Just terribly inconvenienced you, for a change."

 

"Unless." Karen pauses. She’s had on the boil a longform piece on sexual harassment in blue-collar workplaces. There’s a group of women from Harding Logistics who are bringing a lawsuit against the company for what they say are years and years of catcalls, groping, sex-for-promotion deals and worse. Karen’s spoken to 50 of them and counting, collecting stories, building a case. Last week, she’d approached Harding for a comment for the first time.

 

She gets out her phone, thumbs through her contacts for the number of one of the women leading the lawsuit. “Hi, Tamika. No, no, it’s a false alarm, I’m fine. I want to know about the rest of you, though. Has anyone...seen anything, or heard anything that might be construed as a threat?”

 

Tamika mulls it over. She’s been with Harding for 12 years and never made it past forklift driver; when she started out, she says, a male colleague cornered her on the warehouse floor after hours and grabbed her breasts. When she made a complaint and got him suspended, the rest of the crew held it against her because it meant they were short-handed. He was back in a week. She went on to work silently next to him for the rest of those 12 years.  

 

“Andrea Castillo said someone keyed her car,” she says finally. “Thought it was just the neighbourhood kids, but then Rocio from sales said that someone left a dead cat on her doorstep.  They know what we’re doing, they’re trying to spook us into dropping it.”

 

“Will you drop it?”

 

“No. We’ve come this far. And you, Ms Page, will you drop it?”

 

“We’re getting this out there together, Tamika,” she says. “You call me if anyone else receives anything like a threat, okay?”

 

At the hospital entrance, she steels herself and walks into the crowd of recorders and camera flashes and phones on video mode. "Will you ever stop hogging the headlines, Page?" calls the Frontline reporter.  

 

"Well, I save you the trouble of finding your own stories, don't I?" she snaps back.

 

 _I wish you'd stop giving press conferences without asking me first,_ Ellison texts her.

 

That night, she dreams of the puff of white, of sinking to her knees on the carpet while she chokes, clawing at her throat. She wakes with a start. She cannot see the clock but the quality of darkness in the room tells her it is around 3am.  

 

There is a figure at the foot of the bed. "Fr - " she opens her mouth to say, but then he lifts his head and the moonlight catches the glint of his spectacles.

 

So it’s going to be another of those nights, then. Wesley comes round as she lies, frozen; the bed dips as he sits next to her. Karen wills her eyes shut, feels a sob catch in her throat. He puts his hand on her chest, begins to press down. It’s a weight bearing down inexorably upon the centre of her, stifling her heart as she gasps for air. The sleep-addled part of her brain is screaming soundlessly. The waking part says, with some semblance of pragmatism, this is a dream, this is sleep paralysis, you’ve had this before, you know it will pass. Her joints are locked so tight they hurt. She wonders if this happens to Frank, if all the people he has ever killed watch him as he sleeps. If yes, how crowded the room must get.

 

Buried in this half-sleeping, half-waking miasma of breathless horror, she gradually realises the light has changed and her chest has begun to rise and fall normally. She sits up in bed, notes that it is 6.30am, feels her head throbbing, looks about her. In the light of dawn, the apartment is empty as a shell licked clean by the sea.

 

*

 

Over the next week, Karen throws herself into pulling the harassment story together. She knows it is imperative she brings it out soon. She’s done so much legwork, but something’s missing. “It’s not balanced,” Ellison tells her. “You need to get the other side to comment.”

 

Harding hasn’t deigned to respond to any of her overtures. Karen’s tried waiting for the CEO in the lobby of their downtown headquarters; she’s been escorted out so many times that a guard snapped a photo of her on his phone and now there are printouts of it at all the security checkpoints. She rifles through her notes again and sees it: Michael Winters, a foreman whose name crops up over and over again in the submissions. Sixteen women have made complaints against him. He’ll be difficult to crack, but an individual is easier than a monolithic organisation.

 

Karen tries to call him, hears it go repeatedly to voicemail. She sends him a text - _this is Karen Page from the Bulletin, I’d like to hear your side of the story.  Call me?_ \- and is about to go hunting for his address when somebody gets stabbed on Wall Street.  

 

"Why do they always have to do the stabbings on Friday?" laments Ellison. "Right before the weekend? Can't they stab on Thursdays, when we don’t have plans?”

 

Karen groans. “I’m working the Harding case, can’t someone else do it? Like Richard - what’s he done all week?”

 

“Richard is on a half-day for his haemorrhoids,” says Ellison. “Which is too much information, but you did ask. There are no secrets in a newsroom. Why are you still here?”

 

By the time she’s wrapped up the stabbing case and typed up her story, the sun has set. She’s checklining her copy when her phone lights up with Michael Winters calling.

 

Karen scrambles for her earbud recorder, takes the call. “Karen Page?” she hears gruffly over the line.

 

“Mr Winters,” she says. “Thank you for calling.”

 

“I can’t talk over the phone,” he says. “You want your interview, you’ll have to come down in person.”

 

“I always prefer to do things face to face, myself.”

 

He gives her the address of one of Harding’s warehouses on the edge of the Heights. “8pm,” he says. “No photographers, I don’t want my picture taken. I see a camera, I’m outta there, you got that?”

 

“Sure,” she says. He hangs up.

 

Karen gives the stabbing story one last look-over, then sends it through. Ellison, she can see when she stands up, is still in the 7pm meeting, so she simply sends a message to the copy-ed pool about the finished story, then calls an Uber. She checks the batteries on her recorder, checks her .380, slides both back into her purse.

 

It’s when she’s getting out of the car into a parking lot with nobody in sight, that she begins to realise this hasn’t exactly been the best of ideas. Briefly she considers paying the driver extra to stay, but he’s already peeling out of the lot. Karen reaches into her purse, turns on the recorder, lets her fingers linger on the butt of her pistol.

 

Winters comes out of a door in the side of a warehouse. “Hell of a place to meet,” she calls to him.

 

“You’ve been causing a lot of trouble for us, Miss Page,” he says.  

 

Karen sees three more men come out of the warehouse, hears the sounds of car doors opening behind her. She goes for her gun, gets it out of the bag, but someone tackles her before she can take aim. They’re rolling on the ground wrestling for it, but he’s much stronger, and the gun goes skittering away into a ditch.

 

Karen screams.

 

“Get her on her knees,” she hears Winters say. She’s dragged onto her knees in front of him. Five men besides him - she recognises a couple from the women’s descriptions that are being implicated in the suit. Karen has faced down Wilson Fisk; she refuses to be fazed by a bunch of guys who can’t keep it in their pants at work. But she screams again for the benefit of the recorder, lying in her purse a few feet away.

 

“Didn’t think you were going to fall for it,” says Winters. He’s in his 50s, balding slightly, mouth with a tendency to twist in a sneer. “But damn, you were thirsty for this story. Couldn’t leave well enough alone, you little bitch.”

 

Karen is called a bitch on a regular basis: when she’s chasing people for a response or ignores a guy on the subway or, far more often than she cares to track, in the comments section of the Bulletin’s Facebook page. She is the kind of bitch, she thinks with unbidden vindictiveness, who causes conversation. “Would you - “ she begins, and feels the sting of a cut open on her lip “ - would you care to comment on the accusations raised in the - “

 

Someone behind her pulls her hair back, and she winces. “There’s a hierarchy to these things,” says Winters. “Those cunts you’ve been talking to don’t get it, but they’ll learn soon enough. You, we’re going to teach you your lesson first.”

 

He raises his fist.

 

Karen, her eyes tracking it, sees it open into blood and bone almost even before she hears the shot. Winters howls, falling back. A couple more shots, more screaming, and she’s able to crawl free, to stagger to her feet as her attackers crumple around her.  

 

Karen holds up a hand above her head, palm open, commanding. The shots stop.  

 

Breathing hard, she adjusts a shoe and picks up her recorder, noting as she does that none of the men has been fatally hit - flesh wounds, Winters’ being the most severe. She walks over to Winters, who is lying on his back cradling his ruined hand. “What the fuck - “ he wheezes, as she puts her foot on the side of his face - for once she’s glad she wore heels today - and presses his cheek into the dirt.  

 

“Mr Winters,” she says, and she’s shaking like an aspen inside but is pleased to find nothing in her voice but ice. “Something from today is going to make it into my story, and it’s up to you what it is. It can be this - " and she plays the recording again, her screams echoing around the carpark “ - or you can change the narrative.  You choose.”

 

“Fuck you, bitch!” howls one of his accomplices from somewhere behind her. Karen doesn’t even look, just snaps her fingers in the air and points. Another shot rings out, and the guy is screaming and cursing. Karen glances over her shoulder. It looks like a toe, maybe. She can’t particularly bring herself to care.

 

Karen turns on the recorder again, sticks it in Winters’ face. “Let’s try again, Mr Winters. Would you care to comment on the accusations raised in the lawsuit by sixteen women, who claim you sexually assaulted them at work or withheld promotions when they rejected your advances?”

 

Winters babbles: “Look, I’m - I’m sorry, okay, I didn’t think - look, everyone does it, it’s not just me, I thought they knew what they signed up for, I thought they knew this was how it’s always been - “

 

“How it’s always been?”

 

“Since I joined, lady! Twenty years with this company. The women never used to say anything back then, I don’t know why the hell they started - “

 

“And what is your age?” says Karen coldly.

 

“Um - why - um - 56?”

 

“Married? With children?”

 

“Why do I have to - “ Karen digs her heel into his face, and he yelps. “Married.  Two kids in college.”

 

“Thank you for co-operating,” says Karen, turning off the recorder. She steps away. “I don’t intend to press charges for what happened here today, but rest assured if I hear that anyone, any single one of my sources has been made to feel threatened for her part in this, I will come after you. All of you. Now get out of here.”

 

She waits for them to limp, groaning, to their vehicles, for the last of their headlights to vanish up the road, before she climbs into the ditch to get her gun. Her heart is hammering. She is remembering, a long time ago in a hospital ward, learning what a scout sniper is. One thing at a time, she tells herself, find the gun, find him, file the story. This ditch is full of leaves. She stands in it, shining her meagre phone light about her, suddenly aware of how silent it is besides the crunch of leaves beneath her shoes, and feels herself beginning to shake.

 

A light flicks on, nearly blinds her when she looks up at it.

 

Frank is standing on the lip of the ditch, a large bag slung over his shoulder with casual deceptiveness, a torchlight raised above his head. He is angry. It is easy to tell when he is; it rolls off him, like steam. Karen is plenty mad herself, so she simply stares mutinously up at him and says: “Are you going to just stand there, or are you going to help me look?”

 

“You’re welcome,” says Frank, but he puts down his gear and jumps into the ditch.  

 

"I didn't know what had happened to you," she says, and hates how petulant it sounds. "Why didn't I know?"

 

“Didn’t want anyone knowing,” says Frank, brusque.  “Had shit to sort out.  What were you _thinking_ , Karen, walking into a goddamn setup like this when you should know better - “

 

"I am doing my _job_ , Frank, and you can't come up in here after god knows eons to ream me out about it - "

 

" - letting scum like that lay their hands on you, I swear I'd have - "

 

" - you'd what?" hisses Karen. "You'd what, Frank?"

 

"You know," says Frank, low and terrible. "You know what I'd do for you, Karen."

 

She turns away. "Except stay in touch, it seems."

 

Frank scrubs a hand over his face in frustration. “I’m a dead man, Karen. Should have stayed that way. I won every battle so far, but I won’t ever be done with the war. And you, what, you wanted me to drag you back into the hell of it? I was done risking you, after Lewis. Anything but that.”

 

Karen snorts. “I think I’ve shown I’m perfectly capable of endangering myself, with or without you.”

 

“Yeah, about that. Why’d you go putting your safety on the line like this for - for what, a story? A byline? It ain’t worth it, Karen, it ain’t worth the risk of you.”

 

"So you're saying it's okay for you to go after them in person, but it's not okay for me to go after them in print?"

 

"Well, yeah," says Frank, rough, "because I'm the Punisher, goddamn it, and you're just..."

 

She surges up against him, fuming, so that he has to catch her wrists. "I'm just what? I'm just what? I'm Karen fucking Page, is what. Don't you dare be sanctimonious to me, Frank, to _me_."

 

“Goddamn it,” says Frank, half as if to himself. “I knew it.”

 

“Knew what?”

 

“That if I came back,” he rasps. “Wouldn’t be able to make myself leave again.”

 

Karen opens her mouth for a retort, but she’s got nothing. The peaty, vaguely rotten scent of damp leaves rises around them in the night air. In the silence, she realises her phone is vibrating.

 

Frank, suddenly self-conscious, lets go of her wrists. Karen, keeping her eyes on his face, picks up.

 

It's Bob, the night copy-ed. "Karen," he says evenly. "Why haven't you been answering my calls?"

 

"Someone tried to kill me. Now I'm half-dead in a ditch."

 

"Right," says Bob. "You've got queries in your story. Plug them, please."

 

“This,” says Karen, “this is a really remote ditch.”

 

Bob sighs. “I don’t care, Karen, make it work.  Do not make me have to bust off stone.” He hangs up.

 

"Want me to shoot him?" inquires Frank.

 

"Jesus!" shouts Karen. "Do not shoot the copy-editors for doing their jobs, Frank!" And then: “Um, so I need a ride. And my gun. Please, help me look?”

 

Frank holds her .380 out to her. “Found it while you were jawing. The van’s parked up by the treeline.”

 

Karen snatches it from him, then goes to him, feels his arms wrap around her. God, she’s tired. “Thank you for not killing them,” she whispers.

 

“Thought you might need them alive for quotes,” says Frank in her ear. “I do know how journalism works, ma’am.”

 

"You ever think about hanging out sometime?" she says lightly. "Without guns or hostages or general death. Just, you know, catching up."

 

“Huh,” says Frank. "Why would you want to do that?"

 

I would like to see you, Karen thinks. Without a gun in your hand or a gun to my head. Without the shadow of the deaths of everyone you loved in your eyes. I would like to see what you are without all that, because perhaps it will show me a way to see myself without this work that has eaten up my life, and the burden of carrying so many truths. "It might be fun," she says.  "We haven't tried fun."

 

"I’m not sure I know what to do with fun," admits Frank.

 

“Neither do I, not any more,” says Karen. “But we have to start somewhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this party has got way out of hand because now there are four chapters? Bear with me a while longer, people.
> 
> For really good investigative journalism on sexual harassment in a blue-collar workplace, see [ here.](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/19/us/ford-chicago-sexual-harassment.html)


	4. Kicker

One of the nice things about Frank being Pete Castiglione is that he has an actual phone that isn’t a burner. This is definitely an upgrade on the flowers-in-the-window mode of communication. WhatsApp is so much cheaper than roses.  

 

Pete Castiglione has some friends, although the number of people saved in his contact list can be counted on one hand. Karen knows this because she has become the kind of person who surreptitiously spies on other people’s phones over their shoulders, a useful habit to check if other reporters are trying to scoop her at press conferences. She is not surreptitious about it with Frank, who does not really seem to care. After all, she has invaded his privacy before in far more egregious ways, such as breaking into his house before they were even properly introduced.

 

The people saved in his contact list are Kilo, Charlie, Delta, Sierra and Lima. She is Kilo. The others are Frank’s veteran group leader Curtis, Lieberman, Mrs Lieberman and for some reason their daughter. Karen asked at one point what Frank had to talk about with a teenage girl. “Book club,” was all Frank said.

 

Frank hates Pete Castiglione. There will never stop being a part of him that longs to be elbow-deep in mud and blood, the kind of thing which Pete has no truck with. Pete is a plaster over the open wound that is Frank Castle, one that reopens every time he reads the news, or hears the crackle of gunfire across town, or sees a little girl the age his Lisa would have been. Karen is no longer concerned about keeping the wound closed, only trying to make sure he does not bleed to death in the meantime.

 

_stakeout tonight. you in?_

_it’s gangsters you’ll like it_

_we’re taking my van_

_oh no not the murder van_

_don’t call it that_

_jesus_

_8pm?_

_k bring snacks_

 

Book club this week is Rebecca West’s The Return Of The Soldier, which Frank is reading a library copy of (besides WhatsApp, Pete Castiglione also has a library account) with a small torchlight. Karen eats a chocolate bar in the passenger seat and looks through documents from a corruption story she has on the boil. “This has got to be the worst cover-up I’ve ever seen,” she says. “Look, they’re even charging their bribes to the expense account. At least try, guys.”

 

“No fun in that,” says Frank, turning a page. “Give it to an intern.”

 

“We had to fire the interns last week,” says Karen. “They really couldn’t spell. It was bad for Mitsuko’s blood pressure. How’s your book?”

 

“Too much psychoanalysis,” says Frank. “Shit’s not that simple. West is all right, though. Hell of a lot better than Ford Madox Ford. Leo says I need to give the Modernists more of a chance, so I’m trying.”

 

The Liebermans are many things, reflects Karen, but subtle they are not. She says as much to Frank.

 

“You don’t know the half of it,” says Frank. “You know her mother made out with me once?”

 

Karen chokes on the chocolate. “You what?”

 

“Yeah,” says Frank nonchalantly. “David was mad as hell. But then I brought him back to life, so now we’re all good.”

 

Karen folds the chocolate wrapper into a triangle between her fingers, thinking. “You told me that just to see my reaction, didn’t you?”

 

Frank shrugs, and turns another page.

 

Karen throws the wrapper triangle at him. “You’re an asshole.”

 

“Sure,” says Frank. “Unless you want I should go back to giving you lousy advice on your love life, like what we used to do for small talk?”

 

“Of the ‘hold on with both hands and don’t let go’ variety?”

 

“Did I say that? Christ, what a schmuck. How’d that turn out for you?”

 

“Well, um.” Karen fiddles with a strand of her hair. “He died.”

 

“Jesus, Karen, I’m sorry.” Frank puts the wrapper triangle in the book to mark his place, then turns to her. “I didn’t ask. I thought you guys just broke up.”

 

“We did,” says Karen. “Then he died. In a, uh, in an accident. It was a while back.  Don’t be sorry.”

 

Frank reaches out wordlessly and takes hold of her hand. Karen swallows and lets him. They sit there in silence, staring out over the darkness of the pier and holding hands over the gear shift.  

 

Obviously this is when the gangsters decide to make their entrance. There are suddenly lights below, shouts.

 

“The goddamn timing of these guys,” growls Frank.

 

“I know, right,” says Karen.

 

“We should go.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

They continue holding hands.

 

*

 

Foggy has to know, Karen decides. Else that makes her a hypocrite on the full disclosure front. “Is that okay?” she asks Frank.

 

Frank considers it. “This is Nelson?  The other lawyer, the good one?”

 

“Yes,” says Karen. “He and Marci - that’s his girlfriend - they keep trying to set me up on dates. They think I need a social life. It’s very awkward, having to keep turning them down.”

 

“You do need a social life,” says Frank. Which is rich, given that his idea of a fun night out is beating up gun-runners under a flyover, or helping her break into a corporation’s bin centre so she can dumpster dive for documents. “But yeah, okay. He can know.”

 

“So I’m seeing someone,” Karen tells Foggy as they sit crammed into a cafe booth with a trio of yoga mums. The cafe used to be a chapel; Karen wonders if Matt would have liked it, or been troubled by its transformation into a cafe that plays the Fleet Foxes on loop and makes its own granola.  

 

“Karen!” exclaims Foggy, pleased. “Who is he? Wait till I tell Marci, she’ll be thrilled. Or actually she won’t, because she made a shortlist and everything and now you don’t need it.”

 

“You kind of can’t tell Marci,” says Karen. She glances around at the yoga mums, who seem fully absorbed in their conversation on child enrichment classes. “It’s, um, an ex-client of yours. You know, the famous one.”

 

Foggy stares at her in slow, dawning comprehension. “Oh no. Oh no, no, no.”

 

Karen steeples her fingers in front of her face and peers out at him from around them.

 

“I was hoping he had gone very, very far away,” says Foggy in sinking tones, “and that we should not ever have to think upon him again. He was my least favourite client of all time, and given the kind of people I deal with, that is really saying a _lot_.”

 

“He’s all right, really,” says Karen faintly. “When he’s not on trial for murder.”

 

Foggy holds up a hand. “I don’t want to hear any more. I want to have plausible deniability.”

 

“He’s clear, okay? He got some kind of Hail Mary pass from the CIA. He has a new identity and everything.”

 

“I just can’t get over it,” says Foggy. “Feels like just the other day that he was kidnapping you from under police protection. And now he’s your what, your boyfriend?”

 

“No,” snaps Karen, instinctively without knowing exactly why. These are names that do not fit. They belong to a different strain of life. ‘Boyfriend’ is the name for when your cute boss you’ve always had a crush on finally asks you out to dinner. ‘Girlfriend’ is the name for when a beautiful girl leaves her friends in the park to go up to you and laugh at your crappy guitar skills. Names like these will do very well for those other people, but not them.

 

“He’s my - person,” she says. “We don’t really have a name for what we’re doing. I don’t think it matters.”

 

“I can’t even give him the shovel talk,” says Foggy. “He’s probably buried more people than I’ve ever hooked up with.”

 

“I can do my own damn shovelling,” says Karen. “Also I know you’re very concerned and that it is because you care, but this is not the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done. It’s not even the most dangerous thing I’ve done this year.”

 

“Why does it have to be the crazy psychopath, Karen?” wails Foggy. “Why couldn’t you go on Tinder like a normal person?”

 

“Tinder is full of crazy psychopaths,” says Karen. “At least this one saves my life regularly.”

 

“How’d it go?” asks Frank later. They are walking in Washington Square Park with a giant Tibetan mastiff called Rufus. For lack of a full-time job - being a vigilante does not offer a good remuneration package, and Pete Castiglione is apparently blacklisted in the construction industry - Frank has started walking other people’s dogs for them. Curtis got him onto it by introducing him to an app, which means he mostly doesn’t even have to talk to their owners. Most of the dogs on the app are the small, adorable varieties, but he prefers the large ones that the other walkers would rather avoid, because they don’t think they can handle them. He maintains a rating of 4.7, which for a former wanted criminal is pretty impressive.  

 

“I don’t think he took it very well,” says Karen. “But he was like that about defending you too, and in the end he was the one who tried hardest - until you went and lost the case for us, that is. I think he’s still pissed about that.”

 

Rufus spots a squirrel in the grass and attempts to go off the path, such that Frank has to brace himself in order to rein him in. “Easy, boy.” Rufus, swayed, returns to the path. “Come on now. Attaboy.” Rufus weighs almost as much as Karen, is so shaggy that she is not sure how he sees anything, and - for reasons his owner has never fully explained to Frank - eats a lot of rice cakes. He doesn’t take to most people, but he loves Frank without knowing who he is or what he has done. Life is very simple for Rufus.

 

They round a corner of the park, passing the Hangman’s Elm, which Karen remembers as the oldest tree in Manhattan from all the guidebooks she memorised when she first moved here. “Nelson’s right,” says Frank. “I’m bad news.”

 

Karen shrugs. “I make a living off bad news.”

 

“I’ve been known to get into trouble with the law.”

 

“I’m a workaholic. I work ridiculous hours.”

 

“I don’t have an actual job.”

 

“I have no sense of self-preservation,” says Karen. “For lunch, I eat cake leftover from other people’s farewells at my desk using old charge sheets as napkins.”

 

“My whole life is a lie,” says Frank blithely. “I don’t even own any of these dogs.”

 

Rufus butts his shaggy head against Karen’s hand, looks up at her and pants eagerly. “He wants a rice cake,” she says. “Should we?”

 

“We really shouldn’t,” says Frank, “but yeah, all right.”

 

They feed Rufus crumbled handfuls of rice cake under the Hangman’s Elm. To anyone passing by, they would look like a normal couple walking their dog in the park.  

 

“Terrible idea,” says Frank.

 

“The worst,” agrees Karen.

 

Rufus licks puffed rice off Karen’s fingers and gazes lovingly up at them.

 

*

 

Frank calls her when she’s at the city hall mixer. Karen does not like mixers as a rule - too much small talk and stressing about smiling at powerful folks with bits of canape in her teeth. Ellison does not like mixers either, but has to show his face once a year and has ordered her and Jennifer Many along.  

 

Karen actively hates Jennifer Many, whose idea of watercooler talk is “Oh my god, can’t believe they actually put your story on the cover, I mean surely _you_ don’t think it should have been on the cover, was it a slow news day or what?” Now she’s schmoozing furiously across the floor so she can come out of this with more namecards than Karen. Jennifer’s so good at schmoozing she’s practically oleaginous. Karen is awful at schmoozing, doesn’t know why she’s here, and is simply trying to accumulate as many canapes as she can so she won’t need dinner later.

 

So when Frank calls, she is almost relieved to excuse herself from a circle-jerk of a conversation with some corporate communications folks and step outside. “You staying late tonight?”

 

“I’ll leave soon,” says Karen, a little taken aback. They almost never call each other except in emergencies, and sometimes not even then. In fact, Frank’s usual modus operandi is to _not_ text and then surprise her by lying on the floor bleeding and saying with great nonchalance, “Thought it’d have cleared up by the time you got back.”

 

“Okay,” says Frank, “see you at yours.” He hangs up.

 

So clearly this is an emergency. Karen strides back into the hall and locates Ellison in the press of people. “Dear God,” says Ellison, “please don’t say you’re clocking out already.”

 

“Personal stuff,” says Karen.

 

“Well, _that’s_ breaking news,” says Ellison. “Okay, you get a free pass.  Off you go.”

 

Back at hers, Karen opens the door to an unexpectedly blood-free apartment, begins to say, "Frank, wh - " and stops dead.

 

There are two vigilantes in her apartment. Frank is by the window, tapping a rhythm with his trigger finger on the sill. And on the couch is Daredevil.

 

“What the fuck,” says Karen.

 

“Hi,” says Matt. He is in full costume, and very ill at ease.

 

"Found him," says Frank by way of explanation. "Was down by the docks for, uh, a stroll - "  _yeah, right,_ thinks Karen " - and ran into him kicking the shit out of some of the Russians. Waited till he wore himself out, then kicked the shit out of him - "

 

“You did not,” interjects Matt.

 

“ - and brought him here,” finishes Frank. “Thought you’d like to know he was back.”

 

It takes Karen some time to find her voice. “A year,” she croaks. “One and a half _years_.”

 

"Karen - " begins Matt, sheepishly.

 

"Take off your helmet," says Karen. “Off, now.”

 

Matt complies, and she slaps him full and hard across the face. Matt produces a startled yelp. Across the room, Frank raises an eyebrow.

 

"That is for lying to me - "

 

"Only by omission," Matt points out.

 

" - for omitting me!" cries Karen. "Again!"

 

"Told you she'd be mad," says Frank.

 

“Seriously, just stay out of it," Matt tells him.

 

Karen points at Frank. " _You're_ not one to talk."

 

Frank puts his hands up and backs off to the kitchen, where he begins browsing through her cupboards.

 

“We mourned,” says Karen, her voice shaking, “Foggy and I, we mourned you, do you know that he still hasn’t forgiven himself? Does he know?”

 

“No,” says Matt.  

 

Karen folds her arms and glares. “If Frank hadn’t dragged you over here, you wouldn’t have told me either, would you?”

 

“Speaking of which,” says Matt, “why _does_ Frank Castle have the key to your apartment?”

 

“Don’t change the subject,” snaps Karen. “What have you been doing that’s so important you let everyone you love think you’re still dead?”

 

“It’s a really, really long story,” says Matt. “I lost my memory for a bit, and then I was with the nuns for some time, and then I had to go and find Elektra, and after a while there never seemed to be the right moment to let you all know, until now, because Fisk is planning something and I need to figure out what. You know what, I should probably have led with Fisk. Please don’t be mad, Karen, I’m sorry I kept it from you. It’s good to see you again.”

 

"It’s - " and Karen realises that despite her rage she is also filled with immeasurable relief, "yeah. Yeah, it is. I never thought I’d - God, between the two of you, I don't think I can ever take anyone dying in this town seriously again."

 

"Between the two of - " Matt pauses, cocks his head, then lowers his voice and hisses: "What _is_ going on between you and Frank?"

 

Karen bites her lip.

 

“Karen?” He is listening, she knows, for her heartbeat, and when the realisation hits him, she hears the disappointment in his voice. “Oh, Karen.”

 

Her chin comes up. “You don’t get to judge. You, of all people.”

 

"I mean - " Matt gestures incredulously in the direction of the kitchen, where Frank is now eating sausages straight from the can with his Ka-Bar " - how is this okay? You find this acceptable?"

 

“Not really, no,” says Karen. She raises her voice. “Frank! Use a fork! We’ve talked about this.”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” says Frank in the tone he uses to humour her. She listens until she hears the rattle of the cutlery drawer, then turns back to Matt. “You were saying?”

 

Matt’s face is a study in discombobulation.

 

"Look," says Karen, "Frank has a lot of issues, sure - "

 

Matt snorts.

 

“ - but it’s not like I cheated on you with an undead ninja who _tried to kill all our friends_ , so. When you’ve sorted that one out, we’ll talk.”

 

“It’s just,” mutters Matt. “Just a lot to catch up on.”

 

“You need to let Foggy know. I mean right now, you need to go to him.”

 

“Okay! Okay. I will.”

 

Karen hugs him. It is a bit strange, because she has never hugged him in the suit before and he is all metallic, but she tightens her grip on him all the same. “Never do that again to us.”

 

“I’m sorry,” he says into her hair.

 

When they’ve bid their farewells and agreed to meet up again properly soon, he gets his mask on again and moves to slip out of the window. “Frank,” he says, with a curt nod.

 

“Red,” says Frank, equally terse.

 

Matt vanishes into the night. Karen finally takes off her heels, sinks onto the couch and tilts her head back to look at Frank, who, she realises, is beginning to bruise up around his left eye.  

 

“Here,” she says, “let me see that.”

 

Frank comes over. “Your ex throws a hell of a right hook. I’d forgotten.”

 

Karen touches it gingerly. “I’m sorry he put up such a fight over being brought in.”

 

“Nah,” says Frank, “it was refreshing, actually. I’d kinda got to missing him, even. Not many out there fight like him.”

 

“Well, now that he’s back, you can have playdates.” Karen sits back, regards him critically. “You knew who he was. How? I didn’t tell you.”

 

Frank shrugs. “Put two and two together, once you said Murdock had died. I was sure the moment I laid eyes on him again. Not making much of an effort to disguise that jawline. Shit, he could use a hipster beard.”  

 

“He said Fisk is planning something,” she says. “He’ll come for me eventually.”

 

“Who, Fisk?” Frank stills next to her. “Because of Wesley?”

 

Karen nods, biting her lip.

 

“Who else knows?”

 

“No one. Just you.”

 

Wesley hasn’t been around much lately, not since she told Frank about him. He puts in an appearance from time to time, but keeps his distance. He sits in the corner of the room, or lurks outside on the fire escape, looking in as she tries not to catch his eye.

 

“Then I will put him in his grave,” says Frank, deathly calm. “He won’t come for you, I’ll come for him. You got that?”

 

Karen smiles wryly. “Matt won’t like that.”

 

“I think we can get Red to make an exception, just this once.”  

 

She looks at him coolly. “When did you know? That you would do these things for me?”

 

Frank considers this for a while. “Can’t be sure exactly. After the Blacksmith, but before the river. But I knew because it began to hurt whenever I saw you. It’s like Bob Dylan said, you know - ‘Everything about you is bringing me misery’. That’s how you know.”

 

“Is that what I do?” Karen asks lightly. “Bring you misery?”

 

“Sure,” says Frank. “Like the way you’re looking at me now. It’s all kinds of hurt inside.”

 

The hard clench in her chest every time she catches his eye; the times he wakes up screaming at 3am. All their shared past; worse, the pasts they do not share. To love someone, she is coming to learn, is to constantly be reminded of all the ways you could lose them. “Sounds awful,” she says, fingers brushing over his knuckles.

 

“It is what it is.” He tucks a stray strand of her hair behind her ear, then kisses her on the forehead. “But that’s how you know you’re still alive.”

 

*

 

"I don't know if he'll come," says Karen.

 

"Who," returns Foggy, "Matt or Frank?"

 

Karen opens her mouth, then isn't sure. It’s 8pm in Josie’s and she and Foggy have acquired a booth, though given the state of the booth she’d really rather be sitting at the bar. But it’s hard to have conversations at the bar and the whole point of this affair is conversation, and she’s no longer sure if this is a good idea at all.  

 

“Either,” she says. She’s fairly sure she can break up a fight between Matt and Frank, if it comes to it. Fairly sure. “I just want the very few friends I have left in the world to get along.”

 

“When you suggested this,” says Foggy, “I thought at first the problem would be Frank. Then I realised the problem is Matt. You know, I’m still so mad at him, I’d tell him he was dead to me, only I actually _did_ think he was dead, so now I don’t know how to express my anger any more. Oh, hey.”

 

This is when Matt and Frank show up at the same time and walk into each other at the door. "Red," says Frank. "Frank," says Matt. "After you," says Frank. "No, after you," says Matt. "No, after you," growls Frank. And this goes on for a bit, while Karen and Foggy watch in mounting horror from the booth, until Frank grabs Matt by the shoulder and all but shoves him into the bar, then steps in after him. Matt seems about to retaliate, then collects himself and taps his way over the booth. Frank slopes after him.

 

“Hey,” he says equably to Karen, sliding in next to her. “Hey,” she says. She can feel his trigger finger tapping on the seat next to her thigh. She reaches over and taps her finger twice on the seat. Frank smiles briefly to himself, then looks up expressionlessly at the table. Matt looks vaguely disturbed.

 

“Well,” says Foggy with forced cheer, “isn’t this nice, all? Been a while since we were all in the same room.”

 

"Last time we were all in the same room," says Matt, “our firm collapsed and he ended up in prison.”

 

"Can't say I didn't get what I came for,” says Frank. “How's resurrection treating you?"

 

"It's very annoying," says Matt. "If I had known there would be so much paperwork, I would just have stayed dead."

 

"Try getting a new identity," says Frank.

 

"Try passing the bar,” says Matt. “Then you’ll see why I’d like to avoid having to do it again.”

 

“You know, Murdock,” says Frank, “I’ve never liked you. I got a lot of respect for Red. He’s a crazy bastard, but he has my respect. You, you’re just a self-absorbed asshole with a sob story and a law degree.”

 

“You know we are _actually the same person_ ,” snaps Matt.

 

“You got me arrested so you could defend me in court,” says Frank. “And then you didn’t even do it right. That, that is some messed up shit right there.”

 

“It’s called faith in the system,” says Matt. “Also, there are few things I regret as deeply as deciding to defend you.”  

 

“I hope not telling us you weren’t dead is somewhere on that list,” says Foggy. “Sorry, am I interrupting the dick-measuring contest? Just want to contribute to the table, is all.”

 

Matt and Frank turn towards him. Foggy stares them both down.

 

“Um,” says Karen, “drinks, anyone...?“

 

"Thank you," Matt tells Frank. "For taking care of Karen. While I was gone."

 

Frank snorts. "Didn't do it for you."

 

"I also want you to know," Matt goes on, "that if you hurt her, or get her hurt, I will break you and bury you. And I was buried by a building, so I know a lot about that."

 

"Fair enough," says Frank gravely. "Coming from one of the few people in this town who can make good on that threat, I take it seriously."

 

"Thank you," says Matt.

 

“‘Course,” Frank goes on, “would have been nice if someone had given you the same briefing before you broke her heart.”

 

Matt stiffens. “ _Okay_ ,” says Karen, “I am _right here_.” To Matt: “Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t that bad. I got over it real quick.”

 

“Whoa,” says Foggy. “Matt, you okay? Do you need the burns unit? Should I call Claire?”

 

“I guess I deserve that,” says Matt in slightly strangled tones.  

 

“You think?” says Frank.

 

“But you still don’t deserve her,” Matt continues.

 

“Oh for crying out loud,” says Karen.

 

“You think I don’t know that, Red?” says Frank, hard and low. “What, you think I don’t know? Nobody does. But if she decides to waste her time on a piece of shit like me, it’s not for you or me to say. Yeah?”

 

Matt says nothing. “Right,” says Karen into the silence, “I really need some alcohol now. Will somebody get me some alcohol?”

 

Josie’s house pour proves so reliably horrible that it effectively lubricates the rest of the conversation. Which is not exactly sparkling, but at least nobody has thrown any punches. There are so many gaps they need to fill in - more on what Matt has been up to while pretending to be dead, what happened between Frank and Fisk in Ryker’s, how Frank and Karen “reconnected” - Foggy’s word for it. “Coffee Meets Bagel,” says Karen with a straight face. Frank almost spits his beer out.

 

"Wait," says Matt. He has perked up. "Sirens. Something's happening Midtown. Sounds big. Like an earthquake, but...not?”

 

“Well,” says Frank, “the night is still young.” To Matt: “You bring your suit?”

 

“It’s in the case. You bring your van?”

 

“Parked a block away,” says Frank. “You can change in the back.”

 

“I call shotgun,” says Karen, looking through her purse to check she has everything she needs - notepad, recorder, press pass, .380. No camera tonight; her phone will have to do.  

 

“Karen, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” begins Matt.

 

“She called it first, Red, don’t be a sore loser.” Frank rises, stands aside to let Karen ease out of the booth.  

 

"I guess I'm getting the check," says Foggy mournfully.  

 

"You have the very important task of bailing us all out of jail later," says Matt.  

 

“Be safe, everyone,” Foggy calls after them plaintively. “Break faces, not laws.”

 

The night air hits her in the face, cool and full of the stink of New York City. Karen breathes it in, adjusts the strap of her shoulder bag. Looks to Matt, scanning the frequencies of the city for heartbeats and screams. Does not need to look at, but feels, the steady gaze of Frank upon the back of her neck.

 

“All right, boys,” she says, “let’s get me a story.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Bob Dylan song Frank quotes is ‘Buckets Of Rain’, which I feel is one of his loveliest, most underrated songs.  
>   
> I spent some time contemplating what the Punisher’s day job might be, if not construction. Initially I wanted to make him a barista (“Hipster barista by day, vigilante by night!”) but my sister talked me out of it:
> 
> “I really can’t see him drawing the flower thing with the foam”  
> “he would draw skulls”  
> “that would be a dead giveaway”
> 
> Then she came up with the dog-walking, and Rufus. Rufus is based on a real dog she met in the park.
> 
> I still believe there is room in the world for crackfic in which:  
> a. Frank Castle goes undercover as a hipster barista  
> b. Frank Castle and John Wick start their own dog-walking agency
> 
> Thank you for your time, everyone.


End file.
